Rules for Being a Girl

I laugh out loud, surprised and weirdly delighted, but then it’s like the laugh jangles something loose in me, and for a moment I think I might be about to burst into tears.

Instead, I take a deep breath and smile at him in the green glow of the dashboard.

“Thanks.”

Fourteen

Saturday night finds me sitting at my desk in my pajamas, trying to keep my eyes from glazing over as I scroll boringly through an ancient SparkNotes guide to the symbolism in “The Swimmer.” Chloe ended up spending the weekend with Kyra, so instead of hitting Starbucks or driving around singing along to her latest Spotify masterpiece like we usually would, I’m listening to Sam Smith, picking at my short-story paper for Bex’s class, and—okay, I can admit it—thinking about Gray. I’m not looking for a new boyfriend, obviously. But still. I liked talking to him. I liked the feeling that he actually cared about what I had to say.

I’m making zero progress on this paper, meanwhile. Part of me just wants to say screw Bex and go rogue and write it on the Hunger Games essay from Bad Feminist, but what good would that do? I’d just be hurting myself in the end.

Grace knocks on my open door. “Will you do that thing with the flat iron?” she asks, holding it up and rotating it in a circle to demonstrate.

“Sure,” I say, feeling my eyebrows flick before I can quell the impulse. She’s dressed in skinny jeans and a crop top I’m not entirely sure my mom is going to let her wear out of the house, plus a pair of wedge booties that are definitely mine. “Where are your glasses?” I ask, ignoring the petty theft for now in favor of getting up and rolling the desk chair in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door.

Grace shrugs, a quick jerk of her shoulders. “I don’t need them.”

That is . . . some magical thinking if ever I’ve heard it. “Gracie,” I say, struggling not to laugh, “you’re basically straight-up blind without your glasses. You’re going to be walking into walls like Mr. Magoo.”

Grace flops down into the chair, sighing loudly in the direction of the hallway. “Well if Mom would just let me get contacts, that wouldn’t matter.”

“Why does it matter, huh?” I ask, frowning a little as I reach down to plug the flat iron into the wall. “Where are you even going?”

“Just to the movies with some people in my class.”

“Some people . . . ,” I echo, scooping my own hair out of my face and sensing there’s more to the story here. “Any person in particular?”

Gracie tilts her head back, her long brown hair reaching almost to the carpet. “I mean, there’s a boy,” she admits grudgingly. “But it’s not a big deal.”

“Oh yeah?” I gather up her hair in both hands, raking through the tangles and betting on the fact that she’ll say more if and only if I act like I’m not curious. “Grab me that claw clip, will you?”

Sure enough: “His name is Louis,” she continues, handing it over; I divide her hair into sections as I wait for the iron to heat up. “And he’s so cute. And when we talk in Spanish I think he likes me—like, he’s always laughing at my jokes and stuff—but he’s popular.” She screws her face up in the mirror, or maybe she’s just squinting to try to see herself. “And just, with the glasses, and the chess—”

“You love chess!” I blurt, unable to help it. “And you’re fucking amazing at it, so—”

“That’s not the point!” Grace interrupts. “The other girls in my class . . .” She trails off. “They have boobs, and one of them has eyelash extensions. And I basically still look like a little kid.”

You are a little kid, I think immediately, but at least I know better than to say it out loud. I gaze at Gracie in the mirror, her clear skin and straight eyebrows, the scar on the edge of her mouth from the time she took a header off her skateboard when she was seven. I want to tell her that Opal Cosare was the first person to get boobs in my class and the boys made her life a living hell over it. I want to tell her that getting older isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. But I don’t want to scare her off.

I’m quiet for a moment, clamping her hair in the flat iron and pulling gently. Chloe taught me this trick, I think with a tiny pang behind my rib cage, patiently doing it for me until I figured it out for myself.

“Anybody who doesn’t think you’re ad

orable in your glasses isn’t worth it anyway,” I say finally, flicking my wrist to make a perfect fashion-blogger wave.

“You have to say that,” Gracie retorts, rolling her eyes. “It’s like, in the big-sister constitution. Next thing you’ll be telling me is I’m perfect just the way I am.”

“I mean, you are perfect the way you are,” I tell her. “But it’s not like I didn’t go through this exact thing in eighth grade. Remember when I begged Mom to let me get a belly button ring before that pool party at Tamar Harris’s house?”

“Oh my god, I forgot about that,” Grace says, grinning goofily. “You kept threatening to do it yourself with a sewing needle.”

“I don’t even think there are any sewing needles in our house,” I say with a laugh. “Like, when was the last time you saw Mom sew something? But I just thought that belly button ring was the key to my glamorous teenage life or something, I don’t even know.” I remember the run-up to that party with a kind of visceral embarrassment—the girl who searched high and low for the perfect two-piece and attempted to contour a six-pack onto her stomach with makeup, wanting to prove how chill and fun and sexy she was on the eve of her middle school graduation—and at the same time I wish I could go back and protect her.

“Anyway,” I say now, tilting Grace’s head to the side to get to the section of hair behind her ear, “if you honestly don’t want to be wearing glasses anymore because you personally like how you look better without them, I’ll help you pitch it to Mom for this summer. But if you’re just doing it to try to impress Louis—or anybody else—I can promise you that tripping down a flight of stairs at the Alewife multiplex is not going to get you the kind of attention you’re after.”

“I guess,” Grace grumbles, visibly unconvinced.

Then she turns her face to look at me. “I thought your article was really good, PS,” she says suddenly. “I don’t know if I told you that or not.”